Please enjoy these wonderful poems plucked from the poets’ solo features here at Escape Into Life or from special follow-up poetry features, such as our Dog Days poems. You can click on each poet’s name to see more work, or on the links listed at the end, and click here to see more wonderful dog portraits by Elke Vogelsang. As always, it was difficult to choose our Pushcart nominations from all the fine work we share with you, and we encourage you to support the annual Pushcart Prize anthology to find more wonderful poetry and prose!

but she finds husbands boring. So I tell her about old admirers, where they are now. I show her an email from one that I know will interest her. He’s an archaeologist, going to Sparta. “Can you believe it?” I ask. He writes, “It’s my birthday… I’m drunk. I’m 48. So have a good night, sweetie.” But she is only interested in the part where he’s going to Sparta. She thinks that he is looking for her, back when she was young, in the years before there were husbands.

They had my skin, these snails, mottled, etched in brown scars. As did the bloodworms slick with this oil-dark world inching for seed. And the raspberry plant roots were whiskered like an old chin. We almost looked the same underground— clay made, soft spread. My face would always be twenty, though, if it had survived.

the examination room makes her shiver. All the Woman’s Daycover girls smile up with plump lips from a basket beside the bed. She concentrates on how the paper sheet crackles when her calves quiver, how her thigh bruises blend into the gown’s periwinkled hem. When the doctor presses open her legs, she clutches the bed rails, above her shoulder, a landscape: blue skies, field shimmers. Sheaves of wheat graze rays of light. Among the crops, a dark aisle grows. A man slices a furrow beyond the mat, the frame. Only she can hear the swing of his blade.

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